After decades bursting through the wall with nothing more to offer than a simple catchphrase of “Oh yeah!” the Kool-Aid is finally gaining a bit of dignity in the form of an actual personality. He’s also going from being played by a person in a foam costume to a computer-generated character, one that is apparently aware of his celebrity status and is attempting to relate to us common folk.

Here’s a retro Kool-Aid commercial from a simpler time. Back when the Kool-Aid man was just a jug with a condensation face that talked. No busting through walls. he just chilled there like a good friendly value sitting on a table. Children and adults just whistled at one another to signify that it was Kool-Aid time. And mothers spoke very precisely and articulately. Ahhh.

Chad, who sent this in, says he tried to decipher this Kool Aid‘s expiration date using the cheat sheet we posted last December, but nothing on this container matches the code format on the sheet. It can’t be that hard to print an unambiguous human readable expiration date on a product. Who else needs to read the date, other than a human? Why should the average consumer have to worry about deciphering a date? We thought we’d all pretty much agreed on some basic rules for how to keep track of the days.

Look at what they did to Kool-Aid man. He started out as a giant jug of sugar water, busting through walls and letting you drink out of him, a seemingly never-ending supply of flavorful fun. Flash forward to today and his liquid stomach is stapled. How the hell are we supposed to have an all-afternoon sugar high off that teacup? And look what they did to his clothes. Instead of fruity nudity, fig leaves. And look how they foreshortened him to emphasize the fruit and berries in his hands. So now he’s tiny and modest and healthy. Yay, how awesome. How far we have fallen from Eden. After the jump, a cartoon rendering of Dane Cook’s Kool-Aid standup bit, which captures the essence of the original Kool-Aid man commercials in its own special way.